The Project

Loreley Productions makes Star Trek films on a pure hobby footing. Erstkontakt was shot in a gymnasium and finished entirely in the team’s free time, with render times long enough that one member’s wife earned a “special thanks” credit for her patience. The bar they set was high: rebuild the USS Loreley’s look to sit alongside the polished aesthetic of the 2009 Star Trek films, and do it without a studio, a stage, or a budget.

The Workflow

The team shot against green screen in a gym, with Jetset running on an iPhone mounted to the camera to track its motion in real time and preview the CG environment on set. On their earlier film, Monster, they hedged by also rolling on a static tripod in case tracking failed. For Erstkontakt they went all in on live tracking with no safety net, and had to reshoot only the handful of scenes where it did not hold.

Environments were built across a familiar indie pipeline: Unreal Engine for the ship interiors (the bridge, the sick bay), 3DS Max for the space scenes and the ships, Blender for modeling the bridge, and DaVinci Resolve and Fusion for compositing, running on a Mac Studio M1 Max alongside PCs for the Unreal and 3DS Max work. The bridge itself began as a roughly two-decade-old free Voyager model riddled with gaps, which the team rebuilt, relit, retextured, and reshaped into the Loreley’s own. Where the previous film’s interfaces were static, here the LCARS panels animate in nearly every shot, which is what makes the world feel alive.

The standout shot used no green screen at all. With the captain (bald, which gives a clean silhouette to key) walking through the ship, the team loaded the bridge model in Jetset, marked his exact path on the gym floor with tape, and had him hit those marks so he would not cross a virtual wall, since the move is locked once the camera path is set. They then keyed him out in software with no green screen behind him, lighting the gym so the corridor reads dark in the passage and bright on the bridge.

The Takeaway

Erstkontakt is a measure of how far the ceiling has moved for passionate amateurs. A team working nights and weekends in a gym produced animated, living science-fiction environments that hold up shot to shot, with Jetset turning a phone and a green screen into a real-time virtual production stage. The constraint was never the tools. It was time, and they made it work.